Pages

Tropico 5 Tips and Tricks

I continue to refine and add new tips and tricks to this page. If you have any you would like to add, email me at tropicostrategy@gmail.com and I will give you a shout out.General Tips

Tropico has a population cap of around 2,030 citizens. It is really easy to hit that population cap and end up with a ton of open jobs. If you are getting close to the cap, look at retooling your industries and possibly importing resources to make more money.

Click on new mission bubbles! Tropico 5 is a lot more reliant on you
clicking on the missions to move the campaign forward. So if you are
stuck and nothing is happening, look around for a mission bubble that
you may have missed.

To cycle between the different types of parks and buildings with multiple models, use the period and comma keys.

Always make sure you are looking at the available upgrades for your
buildings. Many upgrades can benefit not just the building being
upgraded, but nearby housing, education or agriculture.

If you change crop type in a plantation or upgrade your housing, it will
kick out all the employees or residents during the upgrade. If you do
an "Upgrade All" on a large number of houses, your approval ratings will
drop considerably. It will take some time for the residents to get
moved back in. So do not upgrade all right before an election or you
will lose!

Libraries provide research. Each Era has at least six different
technologies, skills or Constitution options to research. More libraries
allow you to research these technologies faster. Campaign mode in
Tropico 5 allows you to continue working on the same island with the
same structures. Some of the missions will require you to research
technologies quickly in order to meet a deadline. So it is in your best
interest to build many libraries in the early part of the campaign so
you can quickly upgrade when you move into a new Era.

Press CTRL+Click when setting a buildings budget to set the budget for all buildings of that type. Press Shift when placing buildings to place more than one building.

Elections If you are worried about losing an election due to being unpopular, enable the martial law edict about a month before the election. Martial law will cancel the elections and give you time to boost your popularity. When you feel comfortable, remove martial law and the election will start up again and you will have another 12 months to gain support for reelection.

Trade

Always keep an eye on the trade deals. Look for products (like oil) with a cheap import contract and an expensive export contract to another nation. Put a ship on each contract and you will make money. Just make sure it is not a product your island uses. If you have a steel mill and you are importing Iron, your island might eat up your profit.

You cannot see export prices unless you are actually exporting the item. This is a guide to show you where you can see export prices.

After learning so much through all the other much more knowledgeable redditors here there seems to be two major factors that influence housing for tropicans.

The placement relative to workplace, unless you have the metro, most tropicans will only live so far from their workplace.

The second one is the wealth required to live in them. You can check this by looking at the dialogue box for each house and adjust the budget accordingly. This can also be influenced by the Mortgage edict which lowers all the wealth required to live in each structure universally.

Protip: To get tenements to "broke" level wealth. You need to set the budget of the structure to the lowest level and enact the mortgage edict, this will get rid of any shacks in the vicinity.

Raw Resources

Ranches degrade the quality of nearby soil quickly. Do not place ranches clumped together, spread them out and if you notice the ranch is really ineffective it is because the soil quality is really low, fire all the workers and lock them out for a bit (right click on workers to fire, right click again to close the job) so the soil can recover.

Cattle ranches have the upgrade Manure Fertilizer which increases the effectiveness of nearby plantations. You can strategically place a ranch near plantations to take advantage of the Manure Fertilizer upgrade.

By looking in the almanac under Economy in Resource Overview, you can see how much of a resource is produced, consumed, and exported.

The
picture above shows you what a Mine looks like in Tropico 5. When you
first start your game, look around your beginning settlement for the
mines. You may get lucky and have one in the viable area near your
settlement. If you see one but its surrounded by a fog, you need to go
explore by the mine to discover it. To discover the mine, you must send
your soldiers from your palace out to explore. To send your soldiers
out, just click on your palace and the explore option will be right
there under "Actions"

One little trick I found with mines in the colonial era, is that you can see what type of mine it is without having to explore it first...

You simply need to attempt to build a mine on the patch in the fog of war, and it'll tell you what type of mine you're trying to build... Useful if there are a couple in the fog in different directions and you only want to explore one of them (hover over, see one is gold and one is bauxite, then go to the gold one).

Foreign Policy

Positive relations with the world will open up trade routes. If you are looking to expand global trade, build embassies and praise all the different nations. An embassy can only praise one nation at a time and has cool downs between action. Build more embassies if you need to improve relations.

Education

Museums have the "Field Trips" upgrade, which improves the effectiveness of nearby high schools. You can stack this effect with multiple museums near high schools.

Police Stations, Fire Stations and Crime

Police Stations will help you discover special citizens. Special citizens include faction leaders and crime lords. Crime lords have a red marker over their heads once they have been discovered. You can banish or kill the crime lords to lower crime on your island, but be wary of upsetting your citizens when you kill or banish someone.

Fire Departments no longer exist. Police stations now have an upgrade for a fire brigade.

Make Theocracy the religious policy of your Constitution. This makes religion buildings reduce crime. So if you build a religious building near a building that creates crime, the religious building will cut down on the crime. (h/t Erman Aydemir)

The Colonial Era is the most unique era in the game. You need to balance growth against the timer running on your Royal Mandate. Here are some tips if you are having trouble:

Balance growth with population. Even if you have the money, you may not have the population to support new growth. I try to keep at least 20-30 jobs open throughout the island in case a ship brings a large number of new citizens.

The Crown missions offer a chance to add 10 new citizens. The Revolutionary missions offer a chance to add 3 new educated citizens. Be careful adding citizens from the Crown missions because they will not support you as you move towards independence. I usually take the citizens from the Crown missions in the early part of the game only. I always take the 3 educated citizens from the Revolutionary missions.

Your money maker in the Colonial Era is cash crops. I prefer to plant cotton if the soil is good for it. Cotton has the mechanization upgrade, which lowers the number of workers by two. When you are hurting for population, it is nice to free up a bunch of workers from your plantations.

Cotton will also come in handy during the World Wars Era. Cotton and Wool (Llama Ranch) are combined in the textile factory to make you lots of money!

Build more than one dock. This allows for a more consistent cash flow as more ships come to all the different docks. Also, the number of trade ships available is determined by the number of docks you have.

Do not spend money just because you have the money on hand. Spend money when you have extra citizens available who can take jobs. Otherwise your building will just sit there with no workers and cost you money.

The Colonial Era can be frustrating because sometimes you just need to wait for new citizens, construction to complete, or for a mission to complete. Remember to be patient while also keeping an eye on how much time you have left on your mandate.

Before the cold war era, don't bother with a corn plantation. It will produce WAY more than your island can eat, clog your teamsters and docks with tons of low-value exports and generally gum up your economy.

The solution: Import corn. Corn is dirt cheap to import and won't flood your teamsters. A single trade ship importing corn is all you'll ever need.

Just wait until you've built your first grocer (so the corn has somewhere to go) before you start importing. The same can be said for fish if you lack a local fish resource.

Once you enter the cold war era and factory farms become available, growing your own corn for both consumption and animal feed becomes more viable and economically sound, provided you build yourself a healthy number of factory farms.

1900-1950 - World Wars Era

Game Play Inside has a guide on making money in the World Wars Era.
If you go with the military Constitution option which requires a high school education for your soldiers, many of your military buildings will be empty when you move into the World Wars Era. Start the era with no high school education for soldiers selected in the Constitution. You can change this later on after you have built a few high schools.

Updates Coming Soon, email me at tropicostrategy@gmail.com if you have any tips and tricks for these Eras.

1950-2000 - Cold War Era

Updates Coming Soon, email me at tropicostrategy@gmail.com if you have any tips and tricks for these Eras.

2000-2050 - Modern Times

Updates Coming Soon, email me at tropicostrategy@gmail.com if you have any tips and tricks for these Eras.

Yes can be selfsuffient on crops and livestock, but mines and petroleum get exhausted. Also this is not as profitable as importing a good deal and exporting at high price. I am experimenting with importing whenever I can even at slight loss, to avoid exhausting my mines.

I can do everything except the "Jobs". It is always very low, understood that you want lots of people to come to your island but how do you create jobs for all of them. Note: not job happiness. I build tons of factories hoping that it will help but it doesn't seem to do the trick. Advice on how to create more jobs?

I have the opposite problem. I try to get my happiness high. I believe the more happiness the more people will come. The lower and they leave. I use Guarded Heaven and still people come. But to strictly answer your question, to create many cheap jobs I recommend timber camps or farms. But personally I don't want a lot of those cheap illiterate jobs. I want to slowly have more educated jobs, but you can't rush that because you have to educate the workers.

How does the building that transport goods work, how many do I need, and dp they only work in a certain area?Also my docks gets overladed 2-3 of them gets all the goods while 2-3 gets none, so the ship anchoring there is quite useless :(.Many thx for any advice

I think you cannot control where the ships dock. I find that annoying. I wish I could ban certain goods from being exported and imported from particular docks. The number of Teamsters Offices you need depends on how much goods is being moved around. If your farms have thousands of product, you need more teamsters, if your factories are empty but you have resources at docks or farms, need more teamsters. Personally I am always understaffed on Teamsters. But they are a cheap job that takes housing, food, entertainment, so I'd rather not have a lot of them but I do always seem to need more. One solution is to stop building cheap stuff. Only build expensive exports. They are smaller in quantity so less goods to move around.